7/7/17

Think you know Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)? You do and you
don't. It's hardly your fault; Picasso began producing works when barely in his
teens and continued unabated until his death in 1973. A visit to the Picasso
Museum in Paris can be mind-boggling as it holds more than 5,000 works. There
are another 4,000 in Barcelona, and you'd still have at least 41,000 left to view
if you wanted to exhaust his output.

Dora Maar

If you're dizzy from even contemplating such a brush with
Picasso, you can regain your bearings with a visit to the Clark Art Institute
in Williamstown, Massachusetts. There are just 38 Picasso works on display and
these have been chosen to make a point, not to provide any sort of Pablo's
Greatest Hits retrospective. Artists as prolific as Picasso draw inspiration
from everywhere and the Clark's exhibit, "Picasso Encounters," is
meant to be doubly evocative—we encounter Picasso through the eyes of some of
the encounters that influenced him, among them: the Old Masters, cubists, printmakers,
the stage, and women. Especially women. Picasso was, by today's standards, a
serial womanizer, but les femmes were
more than sexual conquests for Picasso; they were his muses. In fact, he had
trouble working unless there was a woman (or two or three) in his life, whether
they were kin, friends, wives, or mistresses. If you think that his
modernist/cubist/surrealist mash-ups are merely eye-catching and strange, look
hard at his 1937 Portrait of Dora Maar,
the photographer and artist with whom Picasso had a brief affair. This painting
is so lovingly rendered that the only adjective that really fits is
'beautiful.'

Minotauromachia

Picasso had many women in his life, the most important of
whom were Maar, Fernande Olivier, Marie-Thérèse Walter, François Gilot, Olga
Khokhlova, and Jacqueline Roque. He only wedded the last two, which means his
domestic life was often chaotic. We see this in Minotauromachia, outwardly an amalgamation of modernism, a medieval
woodcut, and the Greek story of the Minotaur etched onto paper. But it's also
an allegory of Picasso's complicated home life, with the partially nude body of
his mistress (Walter) lying across a horse fleeing the horned beast, while unfeeling
Picasso's wife (Khokhlova) looks down from above and a figure that is probably
Pablo hightailing it up a ladder to safety.

The Italian Woman

We see different kinds of encounters in this exhibit as
well, among them: an early self-portrait that owes much to Velasquez; a
Cranach-inspired Venus and Cupid; and
his 1953 The Italian Woman, which was
influenced by the work of a relatively obscure 18th century painter
named Victor Orsel. The last is a graceful front-facing portrait that would be
suggestive of Mexican portraits tinged with Georges Rouault were it not for the
impish figures etched above the model. For me the most surprising works were
Picasso's linoleum cuts, not because they are necessarily his strongest images,
but because they highlight the ways in which he kept his vision clearly
imagined through several layers—like a chess player strategizing five moves
ahead. Portrait of a Young Girl, after
Cranach the Younger II looks at first glance like it an offbeat rendering
of a red queen from a pack of playing cards until you think of what it took to
produce this one print. Among other things, Picasso had to think through how
every dot of red and scratch of black (of which there are many) would look like
when the final version was inked and pressed.

This is a thoughtfully curated exhibit that gives weight to
the credo less is more. Is there more to say about Picasso? Of course, but the
beauty of the Clark exhibit is that we can begin to hear some of those things
without the cacophony of all that could
be said about him.

7/5/17

There's a line from an old Don McLean song that goes: The world was never meant for one as
beautiful as you. He was singing about Vincent Van Gogh, but the lyrics
could have been written for the titular character of the new Miguel Arteta film
Beatriz at Dinner, though I'm glad
McLean didn't waste his words on the biggest dud I've experienced over the July
Fourth holiday.

Beatriz (Selma Hayek) is a middle-aged woman with an old
soul. She works as a holistic healer at a Los Angeles cancer clinic where she's
part massage therapist, part yoga instructor, and part New Age practitioner.
Because she's, you know, Mexican, she also has gig as freelance masseuse to the
rich, pampered, and clueless. How else can she afford to live in San Jose and
put kibbles in the dog dishes and greens in the pen of her pet goat?

Aside from a few establishing shots, this film covers a
single day in Beatriz's life—one in which she leaves her day job, battles rush
hour traffic, and wends her way to the gated hillside estate of a regular
client, Kathy (Connie Britton), who simply must
have a massage before her husband Grant (David Warshofsky) entertains a few
very exclusive business associates: Yuppie hotel builder Alex (Jay Duplass),
his pampered wife, Shannon (Chloë Sevigny); and the big fish: Doug Strutt (John
Lithgow) and his third wife, Jeana (Amy Landecker). Strutt is one of the
world's wealthiest people, a rapacious real estate mogul without a PC bone in
his body or a hint of social conscience in his soul. He's accustomed to getting
what he wants, which gives him free rein to be a loud-mouthed bigot who seems
to have been fashioned out of equal parts Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump, and
Walter Palmer (the moneyed dentist who killed Cecil the lion). When Beatriz's car won't start and she
becomes the unwanted seventh dinner guest, the stage is set for a clash between
her humanistic, Gaia-centered values and the cultures of arrogance and greed.

Beatriz at Dinner
has been called a Trump-era morality tale. By all rights, I should have loved
this film and its messages. The bling-and-brag crowd couldn't be more awful in
their money-grubbing inhumanity, materialistic shallowness, and soul-crushing
smugness. They represent the puppet masters that make the Make America Great
Again lumpenproletariat dance like
limp marionettes. And yet, I disliked this film pretty much from its
onset.

It could have been a dark and frank look at social class,
ethnocentrism, and avarice. To have been so, though, would have required an
ingredient fully missing from the menu: nuance. By tarring Strutt (get it?) and
his circle with such a broad brush, director Arteta reduces evil to
cartoon-like caricatures. And by continuing to slather layer upon layer of that
tar, the Strutts of the planet become unbelievable rather than indefensible.

Perhaps this would have made a searing play. It is clearly a
vehicle for Lithgow, who does his best to convey amoral creepiness. His is a
superb performance and he should not be blamed for the weaknesses in Mike
White's screenplay. Lithgow, alas, is the only one with much to do in this
film.

The rest of the ensemble is competent, but
underutilized—especially Britton, Sevigny, and Landecker, who spend most of the
film either being catty or shrugging their shoulders in "Whatcha gonna
do?" apologies for the outlandishly jerk-like behaviors of their
respective alpha males.Though she
is the co-star, Hayek doesn't sparkle either. She spends some of the film
interrupting conversation, getting unattractively drunk, and committing social
faux pas. Call them characteristics out of character for her character, though
very few people would behave this aggressively, even before the most deplorable
of hosts. The rest of the time, Hayek doesn't speak much at all; she hovers
around the film's edges and looks sad. Pan to Hayek's sad face. Move in on her
even sadder eyes. Feel the weight on her sad shoulders…. And if you haven't
gotten the fact that Beatriz is, like really sad, overlay her disconsolance
with hints of homesickness glimpsed via flashbacks of a gauzy youthful
idyll.

I do not wish to defend the lifestyles of the opulent and boorish,
but this film fails to take them down. It's far too trite to do that.

I didn’t like this book; I adored it! It is so well written that it
reads like novel. Among the unorthodox things Jeremy McCarter has done is pen
it in the present tense. Another is to make its major theme the death of
idealism. Or perhaps I should say its betrayal.

McCarter, a Chicago-based
writer and critic, turns his gaze to the first two centuries of the 20th
century, a time in which American socialism sprouted, blossomed, and was pulled
up by the roots—its dreams of a global cooperative community sacrificed upon
World War One’s altar of militarism, nationalism, greed. Rather than tell this
tale through the usual channels of analyzing historical forces, material
conditions, and mounting tensions, McCarter shows how larger dramas played out
in the lives of five fascinating characters: Max Eastman (1883-1969), John Reed
(1887-1920), Alice Paul (1885-1977), Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), and Randolph
Bourne (1886-1918). He chose well, as between them, they moved in circles that
represented the numerous strains within American culture.

The book’s title is apt, for
the five radicals were indeed young and were, in their own ways, warriors
within the “war for American ideals.” If you associate socialism with glum
Russian apparatchiks, think again. Max Eastman was the editor of The Masses, a publication that was as
much bohemian as socialist. Its pages supported labor unions, social equality, and
pacifism, but also sported graphic art, poetry, and fiction that ranged from
agit-prop to whimsical. It survived on a hope, serendipitous donations, and
Eastman's dogged determination to keep it afloat.

Journalist “Jack” Reed was an
energetic swashbuckler crossed with a frat boy. He seduced and exasperated, pontificated at one moment and
betrayed his half-baked views the next, pissed off his friends as he exhaled and
charmed them on the inhale. He was the very scarred embodiment of a fast, hard,
full, short life. He needed to be
where the action was, which is why he didn’t allow a lost kidney to keep him
out of Europe as war clouds gathered and why he was a firsthand witness to the Russian
Revolution.

Alice Paul wasn't good at moderation
either. Like a reckless campus radical, she put her body on the line for the
cause of suffrage and wore out others in the process, including Inez Milholland
Boissevain who died from taking part in Paul-orchestrated non-stop agitation.
Paul’s was a world of picketing, workhouse internments, force-feedings, and
embarrassing President Wilson. One of the book’s many revelations is the depth
of mutual contempt between Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt. Catt saw Paul as an
impetuous troublemaker who threatened her careful one-state-at-a-time strategy
and nearly cost Wilson the White House; Paul saw Catt as a self-aggrandizer willing
to tolerate the status quo to be an insider player in the Wilson
administration.

The latter charge was also
leveled at Lippmann, with some justification. Lippmann, who co-founded the New Republic, was an intellectual who
had trouble reconciling idealism and pragmatism. As war loomed, he jettisoned socialism
for liberalism and joined Wilson’s team in the vain hope the war would "make
the world safe for democracy.” Lippmann actually wrote most of Wilson’s famed
14-Points, but their abandonment led him to leak an internal document that
doomed Wilson's nationwide campaign for the League of Nations.

A good tale requires a
tragic figure and few were more so than Randolph Bourne. His was one of the
most inventive minds of his day. Bourne dreamt of transnational identities, cosmopolitanism,
and universal citizenship decades before Greenwich Villagers imagined themselves
global villagers. His capacious mind was housed in a sickly hunchbacked body
that he felt was doomed to be unloved. He was wrong; the beautiful free
spirited actress Esther Cornell seems to have accepted his marriage proposal,
only for Bourne to perish in the postwar influenza epidemic.

The postwar fallout took
more than Bourne with it. Socialism’s promise also faded—not just because of wartime
repression and the postwar Red Scare—but because idealists often battled with each
other, and bitterly so over the war. It has been said that World War One was
the only war wished into being by the left. Though somewhat hyperbolic, roughly
half of U.S. socialists—including Lippmann and John Dewey—supported the conflict.
Pro-war socialists were mistaken. History would soon judge the Great War a
disaster in nearly every way one can measure such things. Ideals such as
transnationalism gave way to cynicism and insularity. Paul would hold fast to
her principles, but Eastman and Lippman would embark on several journeys
between left, center, and right before settling into contrarianism.

McCarter’s book is a
masterpiece of forgotten and overlooked detail. It is also an examination of how
dream worlds and officialdom overlapped and separated. The book is so compellingly
written that I shall refrain from quoting so you can make your own discoveries and
savor the richness of its prose. Kudos to McCarver for restoring the “story” in
history and making tales come alive in real time. One can dispute whether the hopes
of McCarter's five young radicals were admirable or misguided, but there is
something tragic in the observation that we now live in a world too parochial
to conceive of globalism in non-economic terms. #jxmccarter

What's This Blog About?

Who needs to read about the latest pop chart tart? Who cares about another formulaic mall movie? That's what People Magazine is for, right?

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